Today is an awful anniversary: the anniversary of Friday the 13th, two years ago. For me, that’s the touchstone date for the pandemic’s first punch. For others it will vary by a day or two but in my calendar, it was on that aptly-named ill-fated day in 2020 that the coronavirus began its malignant sweep across our nation.
Two years ago, today.
Its startling speed was mirrored by a poignant personal ordeal. Someone my family and I loved had died, and we had plans to meet in California for a memorial. All told, some 200 people, family and friends, would gather at a local art center. But as alarms about the virus began to sound, county-wide restrictions were laid down to limit attendance to just a hundred, then to only fifty, and then, before that even sank in, to close the center and cancel the memorial. All in the short space of two days leading to Friday the 13th.
For my family and me, that’s when the world changed, but it wasn’t only us. Across America, our rueful ritual was repeated and before we knew it, we were all in a free fall. Without a clue about what would lie ahead.
We never imagined, not at the outset, that this virus would fundamentally alter how we live. That it would lead to abandoned offices and empty restaurants and shuttered stores, to airplanes grounded and stadiums closed and streets deserted. We never imagined that we’d suffer shortages of everything from computer chips to toilet paper, and that solid businesses would go bankrupt. We never imagined that we’d see schools shut down and students missing months of an irretrievable education, or hospitals bursting with patients on the edge of death and when they died, that they’d die alone. We never imagined that society would recognize that grocery clerks and teachers and truck drivers and medical workers were the heroes who arguably kept us from civil unrest.
On a trivial level, we never imagined that we’d be washing our groceries. On a tragic level, we never imagined that in the United States, almost a million people would die from the virus, six million worldwide.
We never imagined.
We never imagined that parents would turn a blind eye to restrictions they’d carefully crafted on screen time for their children. Or that people would let warning signs of heart pain play out rather than go to the hospital. Or that we’d fear the proximity of strangers. Or that we’d stop shaking hands. Or that we’d go so unendurably long before being in the same room again with loved ones. Or that we’d spend the better part of two years wearing masks, let alone that we’d be fighting about them, as if a pandemic is political. We never imagined that a virus that knows no difference between one ideology and another would morph into angry arguments about who has the right to protect us. We never imagined that science would be shunned.
There has been a lot of anger. There has been a lot of angst. There has been a lot of tears.
To be sure, some rejoiced at the new normal: the slower pace of life, the easier choice of wardrobe, the discovery of simple pleasures, and for families who weren’t separated, the togetherness that the old normal rarely allowed. But others saw the new normal— the lonely isolation of the lockdown, even the impersonal communication on Zoom— as imprisonment. One commentator wrote six months into the lockdown, “Yesterday was a long year.”
Just a couple of months into the pandemic, I wrote about one poor woman, a friend of a friend, whose husband had lung disease and whose five-year-old granddaughter had a compromised immune system. They were imprisoned by their bodies before the coronavirus even struck. When asked how anyone might help with her burdens, she simply said, “Catch my tears.”
But there also has been a lot of resilience, a new iteration of the adage, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Resilient citizens innovated to keep their sanity. Resilient educators innovated to keep their students learning. Resilient businesses innovated to keep their heads above water. One futurist called it, “The acceleration of ideas.” Distance learning, ghost restaurants, e-sports, telemedicine, streaming entertainment, videoconferencing and more, becoming daily realities and going mainstream.
And there has been humor. Early on, a joke went around about an offer to swap a four-bedroom home for a 12-pack of toilet paper. Another described the newest sales pitch for real estate agents: “Can’t you just see yourself quarantining in this beautiful home?” Someone wrote about how he had just seen his homebound neighbor talking to his cat, thinking the cat actually understood, then he explained, “I went back home and told my dog about it. We had a good laugh.” Someone else quipped that dogs were having the time of their lives during the pandemic because for once, people weren’t shutting the door and leaving them alone from dawn to dusk. They got more walks than ever. Who knows, maybe it’s the dogs who started this mess.
We have learned a lot, we have suffered a lot, we have battled a lot, we have cried a lot. What we don’t know is, have we seen the worst? We see no surge for now, so vaccine requirements and mask mandates have been falling by the wayside, but still, as the head of the American Public Health Association reminded us this week, “The virus has fooled us every time.” A more menacing reminder: almost 1,300 people in the U.S. still are dying every day from this virus.
Is this the last anniversary we shall need to note? I always tried to avoid the cheap journalistic trick of ending a story by saying, “It remains to be seen.” But with this pandemic, there is no other way to put it.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.